Yesterday, we had a post about Michael Cobley‘s first trilogy of novels — the Shadowkings grimdark fantasy series. Today, we turn our eyes to the future, and are able to share with you the cover for Michael’s next novel, SPLINTERED SUNS! (The cover was first unveiled on Sci-Fi Now‘s webiste.)

A stand-alone sci-fi novel set in the author’s Humanity’s Fire universe, it is due to be published by Orbit Books in the UK and US in December 2018. Here’s the synopsis…

A speed of light space adventure novel of a treasure hunt that could unlock all the wonders of a vast and advanced civilization’s lost technologies.

For Pyke and his crew it should have been just another heist. Travel to a backwater desert planet, break into a museum, steal a tracking device then use it to find a ship buried in the planet’s vast and trackless sandy wastes.

Except that the museum vault is a bio-engineered chamber, and the tracking device is sought-after by another gang of treasure hunters led by an old adversary of Pyke’s, the devious Raven Kaligara. Also, the ship is quarter of a million years old and about two kilometres long and somewhere aboard it is the Essavyr Key, a relic to unlock all the treasures and technologies of a lost civilisation…